Читать книгу 47 Sorrows - Janet Kellough - Страница 4

Thaddeus Lewis was splitting kindling in the back dooryard of the Temperance Hotel when he heard the children screaming. They came howling up from the direction of the shore — his granddaughter Martha in front, holding her side as if she had a stitch in it. Behind her were the two Carpenter boys and Michael Donovan, who, although he was far bigger than any of the others, was slow, the general opinion being that he was slightly addled as the result of being struck on the head by a large oak branch which had fallen through his roof one stormy night. Little Rosie Carpenter, wailing like a banshee, trailed the others by thirty yards or so. Thaddeus paused in his chopping and stood waiting until Martha reached him.

“On … the … beach. That way.” She pointed with the hand that wasn’t clamped to her abdomen, and then flopped, gasping, onto the ground.

“It’s … a … monster,” panted one of the Carpenter twins. Thaddeus could never tell which one was which.

“No, a big frog,” said the other. He hadn’t run as fast, and so had a little more breath.

“Uh uh. Dragon,” said Michael.

Rosie had finally reached him, but she didn’t stop to say anything. She just continued to wail as she ran past him toward home.

“Where exactly did you find this monster?” Thaddeus asked.

“On down the shore …”

“Not very far …”

“Yes it was, it was a mile …”

“Down the lakeshore …”

Thaddeus silenced them with a hand. “Wait here.”

He walked across the yard to the hotel’s back door, but just as he reached it, it opened. Martha’s father, Francis Renwell, was there, a worried expression on his face.

“I heard screaming. What’s all the excitement?”

“The children say they found something strange down by the lake. You’d better come along.”

The Carpenter boys led the way, with Martha beside her father and Lewis and Michael a few steps behind. Fractured, irregular pieces of loose limestone and exposed tree roots made walking difficult along the shore. Thaddeus felt a familiar throb of pain in his knee as he stepped on a stone ledge that crumbled underfoot and caused him to slip sideways. As they rounded a bend in the shoreline, he could see a mob of birds — gulls, crows, and vultures — clustered around and on top of what looked like a mound of clothing. At the approach of the humans they shrieked and flapped out of the way.

It was obvious that there was no life left in the figure the birds had been picking at. The body was bloated, whether from being immersed in the water or from the natural gases that accumulate after death, Thaddeus had no way of knowing. He took only one quick look, then turned to Francis.

“Take the children back to the hotel, then go for the constable and the doctor. You’ll go faster than I could.”

He did his best to keep the birds from the corpse as he waited, but the crows, in particular, were persistent and sly. They darted in to peck away a morsel whenever they dared, then scrambled away, only to swoop down again a few moments later.

Judging from the tatters of clothing, this frightful figure had been a woman once. A cook aboard one of the lake boats perhaps? Or had some other disaster befallen her? It was no wonder the children had mistaken her for some sort of monster, Thaddeus thought. Her skin was a deep mottled burgundy, split in places, but he didn’t know whether this was from the grotesque swelling that had taken place or if some marine animal had fed on her. One eye was little more than an empty socket. He suspected that the birds were responsible for this — they always went for the soft parts first. Her tongue protruded obscenely as her remaining eye stared sightless at the sky. The Carpenter boy had been closest in his description of what they had found. She had a distinctly froglike appearance.

Francis must have run. It was only a few minutes before he returned with Constable Williams, though it seemed to Thaddeus that he had passed hours in the company of this macabre discovery.

“We’ll have to wait for the doctor, but there’s no question that she drowned,” the constable said. “I haven’t heard of any wrecks recently, but that doesn’t mean nothing. She could have fallen off a wharf or a small boat just as easily as not.”

After he arrived and had a chance to look at the body, Dr. Keough agreed with the constable’s assessment.

“Poor soul. It’s a dreadful way to die.” He unfolded a canvas tarpaulin he had brought to serve as a stretcher. They spread the canvas out beside the corpse.

“I’m thinking we should just roll her over, don’t you agree?” the constable asked. “If we try to lift her, she’s likely to just pull apart.”

Francis appeared reluctant to touch the body at all. He grabbed a piece of driftwood and poked it under her, levering the body up so the others could push her the rest of the way over. Lewis and the constable each grabbed a fistful of her skirts and hauled.

She must have been in the water for some time, long enough for the cloth to have weakened, for as they pulled, the fabric ripped and the body fell back down again with a soft whooshing sound. At the same moment a gust of wind lifted what was left of her skirts and blew them over her head.

They all gasped. In spite of the clothing, it was evident that this was not a woman after all. The wind had revealed that she was definitely and most unmistakably a he.

A drowning was no great novelty for the village of Wellington. Anyone who lived along the shore of Lake Ontario was familiar with the perils that attended the business of shipping, whether it was of goods or of people. Treacherous storms and shoals claimed many a ship, and the current could suck a body down to the lakebed, only to spit it up later in the most unlikely place.

What did have the people of the village talking, however, were the skirts and crinolines this body had been wearing when it washed ashore. A man masquerading as a woman was no common thing, especially not in the settled part of Canada West.

No clue as to the poor soul’s identity had been found either, and no local vessels had reported a passenger or crew member gone overboard. There had been no purse in his pocket, no papers that might indicate who he was or where he might have come from. Nothing but a frayed piece of green ribbon that might have come from any one of a thousand places.

“Unless somebody’s actively looking for him, I don’t see how we’ll ever know who he is,” the doctor grumbled, “especially if he’s an emigrant. The steamers are so overloaded, I’m not sure but that an entire boatload could go missing and no one would notice.”

“Surely they have passenger lists,” Lewis said. “Maybe we should check those.”

“The ships all have lists when they start out, though I’m told half the people lie about who they are anyway. And then so many of them die on the way over and so many more of them are held up in Quebec. By the time they get through all that and get aboard a boat that will bring them down this way, it’s a wonder they know who they are themselves. I expect it would be easy enough to lose track of a man, if someone was disinclined to be careful in the first place, and by all accounts there’s little care taken about anything in this whole sorry business.”

Canada had been warned to expect a heavy influx of emigrants this year. The potato crop in Europe had failed again after several seasons of failures. According to the newspapers, most of the population of the green country of Ireland lived on nothing but potatoes at the best of times, and this latest disaster had put them into a crisis. The ports were full, they said, with anyone who could scrape together the passage money, all frantic to get aboard a ship.

Canadian authorities, mindful of the epidemics of cholera that had arrived in previous years, had directed port city officials to inspect each emigrant to determine which of these unfortunate travellers should be quarantined and which was healthy enough to continue the journey up the St. Lawrence River to Lake Ontario and beyond. Those fortunate enough to pass this examination were piled aboard lake steamers and shunted along to the next port, where again they were sorted. If someone was determined to conceal his identity, there was plenty of opportunity for paperwork to go missing in all this chaos, and Thaddeus could think of no other reason why the drowned man would have assumed his disguise.

“I expect it’ll be up to us to bury this poor fellow,” the doctor said. “I’ll gladly donate the canvas we used to move him, and I suppose a couple of the local fellows might dig the grave, if asked.”

Thaddeus nodded. It was an indication of his advancing years, he supposed, that the doctor had not asked him to perform such heavy labour, and certainly he was grateful on behalf of his aching knee, but at the same time he was a little annoyed that his infirmities had become so evident to others. Never mind, let the younger men dig. He would stand by the graveside and say the words if no other minister could be prevailed upon to officiate. But they should do it soon, before the smell from the putrefying corpse got any worse.